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The Business Challenge

In order to win their business, IT product and consumer electronics buyers are expecting higher levels of customer service from their eTailers and corporate resellers. Easy access to detailed product information is a big part of that expected level of service. Increasingly, resellers have turned to e-commerce initiatives to fulfill that need. In fact, in a recent survey of over 2,500 IT consumers, "access to detailed product specs" was the #1 factor in making an online purchasing decision.

The battle to attract and retain loyal online technology buyers makes for a highly competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, eTailers and corporate resellers face several e-commerce platform and operational challenges that can restrict them from growing their business:

  • Publishing a Web site or customer extranet with an online catalog of tens of thousands of items without having to manually enter and update product data
  • Expanding the product portfolio and improving the quality of product information
  • Improving the online buying experience for customers so they easily find products and can run multi-vendor product comparisons
  • Meeting growth in online demand for labor-intensive custom features
  • Helping internal sales teams keep up with the ongoing turnover of new products and data
  • Transforming e-commerce into a more robust sales channel that features more than just price and availability information

CNET Channel Solution

With CNET Channel solutions for eTailers and corporate resellers, you can:

  • "Magnetize your site" for new customers
    • Deliver the most complete product information from over 3.2 million SKUs across more than 140 IT, consumer electronics, appliances and pro-sumer photo & video product categories
    • Be the first with detailed product information on newly-announced products – the "info-hub" of all manufacturers
    • Reach out to global customers in their own language
  • Enrich customer loyalty
    • Become the most trusted source of product information – "if it says so here, it must be right"
    • Become the "ultimate research site" with efficient multi-mode search and detailed product comparisons
    • Keep your site "sticky" – frequently roll out attractive new ways to present and package products
  • Maximize online sales
    • Increase dollar value of orders with efficient cross-selling, product suggestions and configurators
    • Enable efficient decision making all in one place – reduce abandoned shopping
    • Deliver an attractive, comprehensive purchase environment
    • Maximize the effectiveness of salespeople by providing easy access to detailed product information
  • Minimize e-commerce costs
    • Eliminate most costs of managing your online catalog
    • Flexible, structured and standardized data is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and better-performing
    • Increase customer self-service; let sales and support shift focus away from routine information requests

Not only will CNET Channel's DataSource™ ensure that eTailer's and corporate reseller's catalogs have all the accurate and complete product information needed to satisfy your customers – but our flexible data will enable new ways to sell your products online.

Intelligent Cross-Sell works like a good salesperson thinks, allowing e-tailers & corporate resellers to target cross-sells by popularity, brand affinity, key selling features, partner incentives, and many other factors. The system then automatically selects and explains the best accessories on a product-by-product basis, dynamically altering selections as inventory and other business conditions change.

CNET Channel's Memory Selector™ takes the pain out of eTailers and corporate reseller selling memory by making upgrades easy on consumers and profitable for you.


Resources

Follow the links below to learn more about how CNET Channel can help eTailers and corporate resellers solve these challenges and maximize the utility – and thus the sales effectiveness – of an e-commerce channel.


Customers

Here's a partial list of eTailer and corporate reseller customers


White Papers

  • DataSource™: Content Delivery and Maintenance for Your Electronic Product Catalogs
    (December 2004)
    This paper will help CIOs and IT/eCommerce engineers in channel businesses understand the technologies that comprise the DataSource solution, how these technologies work together to provide the richest and most complete product information in the industry, and how their businesses can use DataSource to reduce operating costs and drive revenue.

  • Delivering Multi-Vendor Product Information to Facilitate Customer Purchase Decisions: Evaluating the ROI of CNET Channel DataSource™
    (January 2005)
    To demonstrate and quantify the economic benefits associated with DataSource, CNET Channel contracted Callan Consulting, an independent business modeling consulting firm, to develop a detailed return on investment (ROI) model. Callan Consulting interviewed a broad range of CNET Channel customers and gathered data from a variety of secondary sources to create the DataSource ROI model. As this white paper describes key ROI benefits, it can be read either as a stand-alone document or in conjunction with the ROI model. Please contact us if you're interested in having a CNET Channel conduct a 1:1 DataSource ROI analysis with you.

  • Communicating Trust to Your Online Customers
    (March 2005)
    Product information is the DNA of your online store or your e-commerce extranet/intranet. Without product information, no transaction could take place. How retailers/resellers support product information directly impacts their bottom-line results. Many, however, ignore the fundamentals by featuring inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent and confusing information on their Web sites. This results in distrust of the information customers associate with your brand and ultimately impacts your bottom line. In a sales channel where consumers can find the same product at many different locations, product information can impact your bottom line significantly. This white paper explains the seven key content characteristics that build trust and provides two case studies of CNET Channel customers that earned trust from their online customers.


DataSource™ ROI Calculator

DataSource ROI Calculator DataSource™ ROI Calculator  Now you can project how DataSource will impact your environment over a three year period. The results help you determine the costs and benefits of deploying a DataSource solution.